Exploring Office 2003

XML in Word 11

XML in Excel 11

After Office 11 ships, we face a classic chicken-and-egg scenario.
Developers can't really learn the art of modeling data in business
documents without user feedback. But users can't provide that
feedback until they start actually working with XML-enriched
documents. Office 11's XML support isn't a final solution. Rather,
it allows for a long, difficult, and absolutely vital bootstrapping
process.
[Full story at
InfoWorld.com]

There's been a fair amount of chatter about whether Office 2003
will "really" support XML. The answer is yes, but in two different
ways. When a Word document contains schematized data, for example,
and you save only the data, your XML output is pure as the driven
snow:

When you elect to keep the WordML formatting information, you get a
mixture of two namepaces: a WordML namespace with style and
formatting information, and a data namespace (here, ns2) for
schematized data. So, is this just angle-bracketed RTF? Yes. Is it
"real" XML? Also, yes.

It's true that a Word-specific formatting and styling model,
wrapped in angle brackets, is still Word-specific. But as I
mentioned in my
column
on InfoPath/XDocs, that application is aggressively
standards-based, relying only on XSLT, CSS, DOM, and script. I'm
particularly curious, now, to see how these two apps co-evolve. The
XHTML editor built into InfoPath is something I've waited a long
time for. While it's not the tool you'd use to write a 500-page
report, most people don't do that very often -- they write smaller
chunks of text, mostly in email, which is where I'd
really like to see that XHTML editor appear next.